There is a wide scholarly consensus that Nietzsche's GM contains two principal projects. First, GM aims to explain—historically and psychologically—how some of morality's central strands emerged and evolved into their contemporary forms; and, second, GM aims to provide a critical assessment of the value of morality itself. Brian Leiter captures this consensus when he writes, "By investigating the origin of morality Nietzsche hopes to undermine morality or, more precisely, to loosen the attachment of potentially great human beings to this morality."1 (...) But if the scholarly consensus is correct, the opening section of the preface to GM presents us with a puzzle. The opening passage bears no obvious... (shrink)

Tyler conducted a longitudinal study of 1,575 Chicago inhabitants to determine why people obey the law. His findings show that the law is obeyed primarily because people believe in respecting legitimate authority, not because they fear punishment. The author concludes that lawmakers and law enforcers would do much better to make legal systems worthy of respect than to try to instill fear of punishment.

This paper outlines, from a sociological and social psychological perspective, a theoretical framework with which to define and analyse consciousness, emphasizing the importance of language, collective representations, conceptions of self, and self-reflectivity in understanding human consciousness. It argues that the shape and feel of consciousness is heavily social, and this is no less true of our experience of collective consciousness than it is of our experience of individual consciousness. The paper is divided into two parts. Part One argues that the (...) problem of consciousness can be approached fruitfully by beginning with human group and collective phenomena: community, language, language-based communication, institutional and cultural arrangements, collective representations, self-conceptions, and self-referentiality. A collective is understood as a group or population of individuals that possesses or develops collective representations of itself: its values and goals, its structure and modes of operating, its strategies, developments, strengths and weaknesses, etc. Collective reflectivity emerges as a function of an organization or group producing and making use of collective representations of the self in its discussions, critical reflections, and planning. A collective monitors its activities, achievements and failures, and reflects on itself as a defined and on-going collective being. In this perspective, human consciousness is understood as a type of reflective activity: observing, monitoring, judging and re-orienting and re-organizing self; considering what characterizes the self, what self perceives, judges, could do, should do . The reflectivity is encoded in language and developed in conversations about collective selves. Part Two of the paper applies the framework to analysing the individual experience of consciousness, self-representation, self-reference, self-reflectivity and self-development. (shrink)

Individuals with trypophobia have an aversion towards clusters of roughly circular shapes, such as those on a sponge or the bubbles on a cup of coffee. It is unclear why the condition exists, given the harmless nature of typical eliciting stimuli. We suggest that aversion to clusters is an evolutionarily prepared response towards a class of stimuli that resemble cues to the presence of parasites and infectious disease. Trypophobia may be an exaggerated and overgeneralised version of this normally adaptive response. (...) Consistent with this explanation, individuals with trypophobia, as well as comparison individuals, reported aversion towards disease-relevant cluster stimuli, but only the trypophobic group reported aversion towards objectively harmless cluster stimuli that had no relevance to disease. For both groups the level of aversion reported was predicted uniquely by a measure of disgust sensitivity. Scaled emotion ratings and open-ended responses revealed that the aversive response was predominantly based on the disease avoidance emotion, disgust. Many open-ended responses also described skin sensations. These findings support the proposal that individuals with trypophobia primarily perceive cluster stimuli as cues to ectoparasites and skin-transmitted pathogens. (shrink)

We dedicate this book to John Thibaut. He was mentor and personal friend to one of us, and his work had a profound intellectual influence on both of us. We were both strongly influenced by Thibaut's insightful articulation of the importance to psychology of the concept of pro cedural justice and by his empirical work with Laurens Walker in reactions to legal institu demonstrating the role of procedural justice tions. The great importance we accord the Thibaut and Walker work is (...) evident throughout this volume. If anyone person can be said to have created an entire field of inquiry, John Thibaut created the psychological study of procedural justice. (To honor Thibaut thus in no sense reduces our recognition of the contributions of his co-worker, Laurens Walker, in the creation of the field. We are as certain that Walker would endorse our statement as we are that Thibaut, with characteristic modesty, would demur from it. ) Even to praise Thibaut in this fashion falls short of recognizing all of his contributions to procedural justice. Not only did he initiate the psy chological study of the topic, he also built much of the intellectual foun dation upon which the study of procedural justice rests. Thibaut's work with Harold Kelley (1959; Kelley & Thibaut, 1978) created a social psy chological theory of interdependence that, among many other applica tions, serves as the basis for one of the major models of the psychology of procedural justice. (shrink)

This article argues that parliamentary institutions have increasing difficulty in addressing and dealing with the growing complexity, highly technical character and rapidity of many developments in modern societies. Deficits in representation, in knowledge and competence, and in engagement or commitment effectively erode the authority and status of parliamentary government. Major rule- and policy-making activities are being substantially displaced from parliamentary bodies and central governments to global, regional and local agents as well as agents operating in the many sectors of a (...) highly differentiated, modern society. Governance - and sovereignty - are increasingly diffused upward, downward and outward beyond parliament and its government. The author identifies problems, practical as well as normative, with this general development and discusses the possibilities and limitations of reform. (shrink)

This article illustrates the important scientific role that a systems approach might play within the social sciences and humanities, above all through its contribution to a common language, shared conceptualizations, and theoretical integration in the face of the extreme (and growing) fragmentation among the social sciences (and between the social sciences and the natural sciences). The article outlines a systems theoretic approach, actor-system-dynamics (ASD), whose authors have strived to re-establish systems theorizing in the social sciences (after a period of marginalization (...) since the late 1960s). This is done, in part, by showing how key social science concepts are readily incorporated and applied in social system analysis. (shrink)

(1994). Moral authority in law and criminal justice: Some reflections on Wilson's The Moral Sense. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 44-53.

Scientific ideas neither arise nor develop in a vacuum. They are always nutured against a background of prior, partially conflicting ideas. Systemic hypothesistesting is the problem of testing scientific hypotheses relative to various systems of background knowledge. This paper shows how the problem of systemic hypothesis-testing (Sys HT) can be systematically expressed as a constrained maximimization problem. It is also shown how the error of the third kind (E III) is fundamental to the theory of Sys HT.The error of the (...) third kind is defined as the probability of having solved the ‘wrong’ problem when one should have solved the ‘right’ problem. This paper shows howE III can be given both a systematic as well as a systemic treatment. Sys HT gives rise to a whole host of new decision problems, puzzles, and paradoxes. (shrink)

The sublime has come under severe criticism in recent years. Jane Forsey, for instance, has argued that all theories of the sublime “rest on a mistake”. In her article, “The Pleasures of Contra-purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human,” Katerina Deligiorgi () provides a rejoinder to Forsey. Deligiorgi argues—with the help of Kant—that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible, and she provides a sketch for such a theory. Deligiorgi makes good progress in the debate over the sublime. But (...) here I raise two questions in relation to her account. The aim of these questions is to help clarify and augment her theory and thus extend the discussion about the tenability and relevance of the sublime. The first question is about the pleasure of the sublime. The pleasure, she claims, comes from our catching a glimpse of ourselves as agents in the world. But, I argue, Deligiorgi's conception of agency is insufficient for explaining the pleasure of sublimity, and this is because she does not take into account what I call the “ends of reason,” those ends that matter most to us as agents. The second question pertains to the phenomenology of the sublime. The worry here is that Deligiorgi overcomplicates the subject's experience and, in doing so, greatly restricts the scope of the sublime. (shrink)

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. This book explores the relationship between music and emotion, bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers .

On December 15, 2011, a final report was issued by the Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which had been convened by the U. S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) in collaboration with National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. Within a month of its release, this report was designated by Wired Science one of the “top scientific discoveries of 2011” (Wired Science Staff 2011). The ad hoc Committee responsible for this report was formed at (...) the request of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in response to congressional inquiry that had been prompted by expressions of public concern.1 The issues addressed in the report are profoundly ethical, despite NIH’s .. (shrink)

In the relatively short time since 2006—when Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics published an issue on moral issues relevant to the use of nonhuman animals in research [1]—significant changes have occurred for nonhuman animals in many quarters. Public sentiment, new policy initiatives, and scientific studies of nonhuman animals’ capacities have all influenced the ways in which nonhuman animals are perceived and treated in research. Today, a large body of information is available for use in decision making about the acceptability of using (...) nonhuman animals in research. The articles in this issue assess how moral argument and empirical studies stand to guide animal research policies and practices in future years.Many in bioethics have come to regard issues of animal research as a subfield of research ethics, bringing it closer to human research ethics. Animal ethics, like public health ethics, has struggled for recognition in bioethics. As the contributions to this issue show, some in bioe. (shrink)

The demonstration of a sequential congruency effect in sequence learning has been offered as evidence for control processes that act to inhibit automatic response tendencies via unconscious conflict monitoring. Here we propose an alternative interpretation of this effect based on the associative learning of chains of sequenced contingencies. This account is supported by simulations with a Simple Recurrent Network, an associative model of sequence learning. We argue that the control- and associative-based accounts differ in their predictions concerning the magnitude of (...) the sequential congruency effect across training. These predictions are tested by reanalysing data from a study by Shanks, Wilkinson, and Channon . The results support the associative learning account which explains the sequential congruency effect without appealing to control processes. (shrink)

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary (...) focus on discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of animals. (shrink)

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.

This article presents an experimental analysis of several cybersecurity risks affecting the human attack surface of Fairmont State University, a mid-size state university. We consider two social engineering experiments: a phishing email barrage and a targeted spearphishing campaign. In the phishing experiment, a total of 4,769 students, faculty, and staff on campus were targeted by 90,000 phishing emails. Throughout these experiments, we explored the effectiveness of three types of phishing awareness training. Our results show that phishing emails that make it (...) through IT’s defenses pose a clear and present threat to large educational organizations. Moreover, we found that simple, visual, instructional guides are more effective training tools than long documents or interactive training. (shrink)

Appraisal theory has become one of the most active aproaches in the domain of emotion psychology. The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during the individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. The organism's interpretation of events and situations elicits and differentiates its emotional responses, although the exact processes involved and the limits of the theory are still a matter of debate and are currently the object of (...) active research. This volume is intended to become the primary source of information on appraisal for all those interested in emotion, from beginning graduate students to accomplished researchers in emotion psychology. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Two key research issues in the field of causal learning are how people acquire causal knowledge when observing data that are presented sequentially, and the level of abstraction at which learning takes place. Does sequential causal learning solely involve the acquisition of specific cause-effect links, or do learners also acquire knowledge about abstract causal constraints? Recent empirical studies have revealed that experience with one set of causal cues can dramatically alter subsequent learning and performance with entirely different cues, suggesting that (...) learning involves abstract transfer, and such transfer effects involve sequential presentation of distinct sets of causal cues. It has been demonstrated that pre-training can modulate classic causal learning phenomena such as forward and backward blocking. To account for these effects, we propose a Bayesian theory of sequential causal learning. The theory assumes that humans are able to consider and use several alternative causal generative models, each instantiating a different causal integration rule. Model selection is used to decide which integration rule to use in a given learning environment in order to infer causal knowledge from sequential data. Detailed computer simulations demonstrate that humans rely on the abstract characteristics of outcome variables to select a causal integration rule, which in turn alters causal learning in a variety of blocking and overshadowing paradigms. When the nature of the outcome variable is ambiguous, humans select the model that yields the best fit with the recent environment, and then apply it to subsequent learning tasks. Based on sequential patterns of cue-outcome co-occurrence, the theory can account for a range of phenomena in sequential causal learning, including various blocking effects, primacy effects in some experimental conditions, and apparently abstract transfer of causal knowledge. (shrink)

Continuous recordings of brain electrical activity were obtained from a group of 176 patients throughout surgical procedures using general anesthesia. Artifact-free data from the 19 electrodes of the International 10/20 System were subjected to quantitative analysis of the electroencephalogram (QEEG). Induction was variously accomplished with etomidate, propofol or thiopental. Anesthesia was maintained throughout the procedures by isoflurane, desflurane or sevoflurane (N = 68), total intravenous anesthesia using propofol (N = 49), or nitrous oxide plus narcotics (N = 59). A set (...) of QEEG measures were found which reversibly displayed high heterogeneity of variance between four states as follows: (1) during induction; (2) just after loss of consciousness (LOC); (3) just before return of consciousness (ROC); (4) just after ROC. Homogeneity of variance across all agents within states was found. Topographic statistical probability images were compared between states. At LOC, power increased in all frequency bands in the power spectrum with the exception of a decrease in gamma activity, and there was a marked anteriorization of power. Additionally, a significant change occurred in hemispheric relationships, with prefrontal and frontal regions of each hemisphere becoming more closely coupled, and anterior and posterior regions on each hemisphere, as well as homologous regions between the two hemispheres, uncoupling. All of these changes reversed upon ROC. Variable resolution electromagnetic tomography (VARETA) was performed to localize salient features of power anteriorization in three dimensions. A common set of neuroanatomical regions appeared to be the locus of the most probable generators of the observed EEG changes. (shrink)

First published in 2000, this translation of one of the great works of Western political thought is based on the assumption that when Plato chose the dialogue form for his writing, he intended these dialogues to sound like conversations - although conversations of a philosophical sort. In addition to a vivid, dignified and accurate rendition of Plato's text, the student and general reader will find many aids to comprehension in this volume: an introduction that assesses the cultural background to the (...) Republic, its place within political philosophy, and its general argument; succinct notes in the body of the text; an analytical summary of the work's content; a full glossary of proper names; a chronology of important events; and a guide to further reading. The result is an accomplished and accessible edition of this seminal work, suitable for philosophers and classicists as well as historians of political thought at all levels. (shrink)

Response to Emily A. Largent, Franklin G. Miller and Steven Joffe, A Prescription for Ethical Learning, Hastings Center Report, 43, s1, (S28-S29), (2013).

Through our work to examine mathematical and computational learning in authentic and convivial contexts that requires creativity, imagination, reasoning, and discourse, we have theorized an experiential learning cycle that attends to the development of voice, agency, and identity needed in young people for an earned insurgency—the right to demand change. Our work underscores how the current situation that many students face in classrooms amounts to a type of cognitive segregation that denies these students access to authentic and empowering intellectual agency. (...) By facilitating a process whereby students, using their own creative and imaginative means, intentionally develop a type of ownership over the exploration and application of the mathematical concepts they are being taught, we help students move from simple surface level, syntactic understandings, to deeper semantic learning that is more personally significant and meaningful. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to invigorate debate concerning the nature of analogy, and to broaden the scope of current conceptions of analogy. We argue that analogizing is not a single or even a fundamental cognitive process. The argument relies on an analysis of the history of the concept of analogy, case studies on the use of analogy in scientific problem solving, cognitive research on analogy comprehension and problem solving, and a survey of computational mechanisms of analogy comprehension. Analogizing (...) is regarded as a macrocognitive phenomenon having a number of supporting processes. These include the apperception of resemblances and distinctions, metaphor, and the balancing of semantic flexibility and inference constraint. Psychological theories and computational models have generally relied on (a) a sparse set of ontological concepts (a property called “similarity” and a structuralist categorization of types of semantic relations), (b) a single form category (i.e., the classic four-term analogy), and (c) a single set of morphological distinctions (e.g., verbal vs. pictorial analogies). This article presents a classification based on a “naturalistic” exploration of the variety of uses of analogical reasoning in pragmatically distinct contexts. The resultant taxonomy distinguishes pre-hoc, ad-hoc, post-hoc, pro-hoc, contra-hoc, and trans-hoc analogy. Each will require its own macrocognitive modeling, and each presents an opportunity for research on phenomena of reasoning that have been neglected. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Issues in Social Research. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Ruth R. Faden, R. Jay Wallace, Jr., and LeRoy Walters. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. xii + 436 pp. $25.00 (hardcover); $8.95 (paper). Ethics of Human Subject Research. Edited by Allan J. Kimmel, Jr. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1981. 106 pp. $6.95 (paper). Social Research Ethics. Edited by Martin Bulmer. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. xiv + 284 pp. $39.50 (hardcover); $14.50 (paper). The (...) Ethics of Social Research: Field‐work, Regulation and Publication. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. x + 187 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). The Ethics of Social Research: Surveys and Experiments. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. xii + 249 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). (shrink)

In recent years, the right of employees to know about health hazards in the workplace has emerged as a major issue in occupational health policy. A general consensus has gradually evolved that there is a right to know, and correlatively that there is a moral obligation to disclose relevant information to workers. For example, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and several other U.S. federal agencies, informed the U.S. Senate as early as July 1977 that ‘workers have the (...) right to know whether or not they are exposed to hazardous chemical and physical agents regulated by the Federal Government.’ In 1980, the Occupational Safety and Health Adminstration promulgated regulations guaranteeing workers access to medical and exposure records. (shrink)